Salt (7 page)

What a spectacle it was! I have seen visuals from above, which show it streaking like a great firework [
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] round and round the world, spewing more and more of a tail and shrinking. But I do not have to rely on visuals, as you young people today do; I was there, I was on the ground. The
Senaar
was still in orbit at this stage, but we had established a home base on the eastern shores of Galilee with two shuttles, and I chose to watch the spectacle from there. It was a splendid sight, a chariot of fire and steam passing faster than sound to the north, along the equator. After it had gone over the western horizon its sound-wave boomed, with a great sound of tearing, like a mighty cloth was being rent in two before the temple of God. We waited expectantly, and it emerged again, much lower in the sky. And then it crashed, away over the horizon, to the north. It came down as we planned, almost exactly half-way between Galilee and Perse. Some of our people took trucks and drove out to examine the site. They said it was possible for them to stand in the mists it gave off and remove their masks, to breathe the air directly.

Never forget your heritage, my children! Never forget that the first women and men to breathe the air of Salt unaided were Senaarians!

The diffusion of this mass of oxygen fully into the atmosphere took several months; and the liberation of oxygen from such oxides as we could find took most of the year. But long before the end of the year concentrations in the atmosphere were up to fifteen and sixteen per cent, breathable though thin; we had raised atmospheric pressure by several points. The atmospheric scrubbing of chlorine and other toxins was a more complicated task, though.

The difficulty here was that our eleven nations were settling,
mostly, around the three great lakes, Galilee, Perse and the Pale Sea (those who were not settling directly along the shores were choosing sites close enough to the water to lay a pipeline without much expense). Much of our early energy, after we brought the
Senaar
to ground, was spent in building the desalination plants. Water settles in the depressions and chlorine, more than twice as heavy as air, settles in these depressions too. You will have seen, as I have, the banks of yellowy-green gas rolling as chlorine fog from the waters. But my people, and the people from the other ships, had spent decades cooped up in their hulls. We could not hide away, as if still voyaging through space: we had arrived. We had to get out. It is our nature to want to break any bonds placed upon us. Samson in the temple.

We did two things. The first was to dedicate our Fabricants to manufacturing converters for an entire month. These were catalytic-ally-charged buoys, powered by the sun, that locked up the chlorine as solid bricks of chloride plastics. We launched hundreds of these floating detoxifiers on the broad, calm waters of Galilee. The other Galilean nations (they were young then, hardly the great nations they have since become! Still, it is right to talk about them as nations, for such they were, in their essence, in their potential), the other nations along the coast, Eleupolis, Yared, New Florence and Babulonis, contributed funds towards this project. They lacked the specific Fabricant software to be able to produce these buoys but New Florence created some solar-powered catalyst rovers, to travel the depressions and dry sinks in the desert and do the same job there. There were, I believe, other projects launched in the north. But this business of clearing away the poison was very large-scale; it was going to be many years before we saw a significant reduction.

So there was a second strand to our approach. We fitted our people; we altered ourselves! If Moses will not come to the desert, the desert must come to Moses, a proverb of which my old grandmother was particularly fond. The devices we used are antiques now, of course; at the time they were the highest of high-tech. We would take a person, and sedate them, and under surgical conditions we would
remove much of their sinuses and fill the space with a carefully grown filter. An organic substance this, derived I think from coral (you will not know what coral is, of course, but you can check it if you are interested), that scrubbed out the chlorine. And because it functioned as a sinus, the removed chlorine was washed out of the nose again in mucus suspension. A self-cleaning lifelong filter-mask. Perhaps you say: what was wrong with the ordinary masks? Was it so much bother to have to put them on? Well, today (and because of us) you can walk about your homeworld as God made you, you don’t understand the irritation of the masks. The way the edges rub the skin, bringing out welts and infections in the flesh. The uncomfortableness, the sense of constriction. And, of course, the danger: they could fail, fall off; you could be at home when your window is breached and your mask not to hand. Worst of all, I suppose, they were symbolic of our incapacity; they squashed against our faces, artificial pig-snouts, a reminder of our imprisonment. How could we bear to be imprisoned on our own world?

Of course, the Alsists mocked our new technology. It is in the nature of anarchy to fear new technology. Their propaganda satirised us: whenever the visuals were set in Senaar the people always had runny noses; always dirty noses when they represented us! But they did not understand that mucus was only produced when one had been in contact with chlorine; and then it was simply a matter of carrying a handkerchief in order to wipe it away, in the thoroughly civilised manner. With some people, it is true, the implant would cause minor infections, and this would involve them in continual production of mucus; but whatever the Alsists have said, for most this was not a problem. I myself was fitted with an implant (it has since been removed) and I experienced no discomfort or side-effects at all.

My first walk in the open air was televised throughout Senaar, of course. And what an experience! I fitted my contact lenses, and put in place a gum-guard, to inhibit me breathing through my mouth (it is surprisingly easy to forget to breathe only through the nose and a lungful of chlorine is an unpleasant thing). Then I stepped through
the airlock on the crystal-salt beach. To be able to walk down to the water, to feel the wind gently on my face, to breathe deeply (through the nose) of the air of our world! To watch the sun, still white, settling towards the horizon, throwing long black shadows behind us all. I would have stayed longer, but the Devil’s Whisper starts up at dusk.

You may have seen the representation of me contemplating Galilee, with the sun just clipping the horizon, and a crowd gathered to watch me. They were going to put it on our banknotes, but I stopped them because I considered it would have been vainglorious of me to allow such a graven image on something so important as money. But it is commonly reproduced, and there is a mosaic of the scene, assembled from different shades of salt, glued to the wall of the primary debating chamber.

Our solution to the chlorine problem was a mini-mask. It was a clever thing. You would wear it about your neck at all times, like a pendant, but when its sense-cell detected chlorine, at even the most minute levels, it would leap up. Like a live thing, like a salmon, which is a fish that used to hop out of the waters for joy on Earth. A receptor was embedded in your tooth, a tiny device: the homer was in the mask. And it would leap up towards its mate and there the mask would be, clamped over your mouth. You needed to remember to breathe through the mouth only, of course, but it became a sort of reflex. To feel the gentle smack of mask over the lips, and then to take a deep breath through the mouth. Then you had the leisure to take some nose-clips out of your pouch and fit them over your nostrils. Chlorine up the nose is not a pleasant thing. It is a gas that irritates the lining of the nose.

It was characteristic of the Alsists that, without compunction, they stole the land east of the Perse Sea. It is true that protocols signed before the voyage were, shall we say, vague on the subject of exactly how the land was to be allocated although they did stipulate that all nations were to have equal access to water, arable land, mineral resources and the like. But on arrival, it was generally accepted that all ships would remain in orbit until negotiations had reached a consensus concerning land apportioning. Of course, I agreed to host such negotiations aboard the
Senaar
. But the Alsists, and Szerelem in particular, flouted the process of democracy. They took their ship down and landed on their present site without so much as informing the other captains of their actions. I remember the day; being woken by my PA in the early hours of ship-time, and hustling up to the command bridge in my uniform dressing-gown to watch the
Als
bruising the atmosphere purple and red with the heat of their entry. And by then it was too late to stop them.

Today, when it is generally accepted that Senaar is the most advantageously positioned nation (rooted as we are on the fertile east coast of the eel-rich Galilee), it may be difficult to understand why this Alsist manoeuvre caused such outrage. But think yourselves back. With so little by way of geographical features, Salt’s weather is dominated by the coriolis force. The winds in the northern hemisphere are prevailingly western; and Als is positioned at the back of the Samson mountains (the Sebestyen, as they call them), which represent a sort of natural windbreak. But the winds in the southern hemisphere come mostly from the east. East of Senaar there was nothing but a thousand miles of salt desert, stretching on and on until eventually you reach the broken hills north of the De Morgan Sea. Often the weather was calm, but when the winds got themselves roused up they could be fierce indeed.

There were two times of great wind, of what used on Earth to be called
typhun
[
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’
suggest consult alternate database, e.g. orig.vocabhyp
]. One would happen shortly around sunset, when the cooling air of the nighttime out east would sink and push great howling winds towards us. These would last for an hour or so. Then there would be a dawn wind, less savage but just as unpleasant. And wind off the desert is much worse than wind off the water. As you know, the waters of Galilee are supersaturated and will barely take on more salt; salt blown on to them sinks to the bottom as a sort of sludge, which is one of the reasons why the Galilee is so shallow at our end, and why the water is constantly, yearly, creeping westwards. But in open desert, the driest place in the world, winds break the tiny particles of salt into even smaller microparticles of salt that can be as little as a few atoms across. On exposed bluffs, which act like rock anvils for the hammering wind, these tiny specks are blown up by the billion, a stinging, coruscating blizzard that looks like smoke and feels like a million insects eating the skin from your flesh. At its most intense, the east wind will blind the unwary watcher; will make any exposed skin bleed from a thousand scratches. It makes a high-pitched hissing as it moves over the ground. It will entirely devour corpses left in its path within months; and, of course, there were to be corpses (but I will not hurry my narrative forward). It is known, still, to those who have to venture eastward beyond the Great Dyke as the Devil’s Whisper.

We very quickly learnt to stay indoors during the dawn; to retreat to our homes for an hour as soon as the sun had vanished behind the horizon, but the wear on our equipment was very great. Machines clogged up with the fine salt; our plastic windows became so scored with fine lines as to become opaque grey filters that scattered light in sunburst-rainbow patterns.

And so we built the Great Dyke. It is officially called the Barlei Dyke, in my honour, but I am uncomfortable with such tributes. And ‘Great Dyke’ accurately enough describes what it is: a Pharaonic feat of engineering, massive and beautiful. We excavated a kilometre east of our furthest settlement (fortunately the very severity of the wind meant that the topsalt was thinner here than in most places, and we
did not have to dig too deeply to reach bedrock) then we carved out great slabs of quartz and saltstone and lifted them by shuttle to lay a great wall. This we built upon with small stones, and then bulldozed the salt from east and west to create the dyke. Finally, we secured the whole with (to the east) saltstone capstones, a solid bluff, and (to the west) a layer of engineered topsoil which was planted all over with salt-grass.

The whole was the single most expensive undertaking of the pre-War period. It was paid for with a special tax, willingly paid by all Senaarians, as well as by contributions from the other Galilean nations, which were (even at that early time) allying themselves with the strength of Senaar. I contributed a million from my personal fortune. And the dyke meant that the severity of the eastern winds was abated.

Well, to be truthful, for about a year after the dyke was built matters did not greatly improve. The aerodynamics of the thing were not perfectly figured, and for two of the years’s three seasons the winds were high enough to breach it. They would be sucked closer to the ground by the shape and come whipping into our land. More than this, the natural strains of salt-grass were poor things. Plant engineering came a long way, very quickly, but the indigenous strains were brittle and thin. As soon as the stems were a finger’s-length long, the wind would rip them from the sand and throw them downwind. At us. You know how sharp-edged salt-grass is? Imagine a flurrying tornado-wind filled with them. They gave the Devil’s Whisper a growl. We had to plant great pillars of quartz, quarried and lifted at huge expense, to break up the profile of the dyke. And the plant-engineers tried many strains of vegetation, adapted from Salt’s natural growths or adapted from Earth strains: salt-bamboos, which grew tall but spindly, easily broken by the wind. Scrub and web-algae that clogged the spaces between spars. Finally, a stronger salt-grass that held the leeward side.

But what did teething-troubles matter? The dyke was a symbol! It was a hymn in stone and salt to the Lord, a statement of our power to build, to change the world.